Elena Roger

Elena Roger is fast becoming a West End fixture, and not before time given the powerhouse talent packed into the Argentinian actress-singer-dancer's petite frame. Two years ago, she wowed London as Eva Peron in the Michael Grandage revival of Evita, incarnating the potential cliché of an overnight sensation. Within weeks of that production closing, Roger segued to the ensemble of Boeing-Boeing, playing the Italian stewardess, Gabriella, alongside Rhea Perlman and Neil Stuke. Then, this past summer, she made her debut at Grandage's home base, the Donmar, in a revival of the Pam Gems play Piaf, embodying the doomed Parisian chanteuse with a bravura that brought a sometimes diffident London theatergoing public instantly to its feet. Jamie Lloyd's fleet, smart revival has now transferred to the Vaudeville Theatre, minutes away from Roger's erstwhile Evita home at the Adelphi, where Roger took time to reflect on her new theatrical home, the particular rigors of this role and a sky rocketing career that shows no sign of coming down to earth anytime soon.

How does it feel to be in a new space?
It feels different. We have to own again the new space. We have to do more work—we've great new people—two new guys in the cast and five understudies, so it's more crowded. The audience is fantastic.

How do you keep your stamina up?
I'm trying to eat very well, trying to keep happy. I'm doing a treatment with acupuncture and that's helped me a lot, really, and vitamins. Then there's this thing about not speaking by phone and going home straight after the show. I don't drink, I don't smoke, and I just have to imagine that everything is going to be OK. It's quite difficult to wake up every day and feel, Am I going to be able to do this show every day? Sometimes I have more energy, sometimes less, but I try to keep it level.

Elena Roger in Evita

How have you found this compares in difficulty to playing Eva Peron for a year?
Evita was very difficult. I used to do six shows a week only, and I was very tired. Evita was difficult also because of my personal situation: I had just walked into the country and met with new people, new language, a new home, [laughs] new weather: a lot of things I had to get used to, so that was more difficult. I had very good reviews in Evita, so everybody was expecting that I would be wonderful and that is terrible, the pressure. There were some times in Evita where I felt a little bit ill and I had to go and do the show and I wasn't 100% great and I felt tired, and there are days you don't enjoy it so much when your physique is not behaving well. I feel now I've grown up more.

Do the two roles seem at all similar to you? After all, here were two real-life women who knew how to galvanize a public, both of whom died way before time.
Yes, they were great fighters in their life and were born very poor and then they had a lot of money, but they were very different characters. Of course Piaf's life went up and down all the time but I like to feel that she was quite a happy person. She said that she was only happy when she was singing, but I think she enjoyed her life up until that tour which is known as the "suicide tour," when she couldn't perform properly. But even then, she never stopped singing; Piaf always wanted to sing again.

It's astonishing the effect the show—and your performance—have on an audience. It's even more electric and immediate than during Evita.
I think that's because Edith Piaf was very truthful. She was real and when she sang she was real and she didn't live life apart from her performance; for Piaf, it was everything together. She was a great woman in the sense of making us understand that living is about being there all the time and fighting for the things you want and trying to be healthy and keeping growing.

Elena Roger in Piaf

As you are with my career, though you do seem drawn to pretty intense characters.
I do like a challenge. I like to learn, and I feel like I'm learning here. I'm studying, I'm improving things of my own. Of course, when they first said, you can be Edith Piaf, I thought, maybe that's because Elaine Paige also did that part after Evita, And then I was talking with my agent and I had a conversation with Michael Grandage and I thought maybe it was good to do a play. I didn't know much about her life, but I heard the music, which was lovely. I thought I'm going to have to learn more French and that will be useful for my English.

Although you and Ms. Paige couldn't be less similar as performers.
We are different persons. Maybe people think of us together because I'm tiny and she's tiny. Maybe it's because of that: I don't know.

Did you feel Marion Cotillard's Oscar-winning performance from La Vie En Rose hovering over you?
I watched her in a cinema before I knew I would be playing this. I'd already seen it and did think maybe I would start to watch it again but I didn't finish. Now I realize I have to be careful about what I'm playing, what I'm doing with my body, because I have to create something that is comfortable for me to do, and to do it with truth—and something, also, that I can do every day. I always think you can learn a lot from the other performer but your instrument is nothing compared to everybody else. It's my instrument and I can do what my instrument can do. I won't be able to play it like Marion, never. It has to be different.

Do you think you actually resemble Piaf?
No, my sister Amalia looks more like her. She had not so round a face, not so big a nose. She was small, maybe a little bit smaller than I am.

But there's no doubt you connect with her on a pretty deep level.
The story really touches me a lot, I think, because she was a performer, and I can connect with that. The thing is I enjoy very much being on stage, and I really hope to be very strong to do this eight times a week for three months. The other bit that keeps me going when I have to do a performance is that on the day Piaf's lover Marcel died, she went to the theater and she did her performance for him: she didn't stop. Sometimes I feel a little bit weak myself, and I think, well, she did it. We have to be there to do it.